a journey

What will things be like for you in a year?

Well, I don’t know. I’ve been asked a few times since having DBS surgery and I don’t know is the simplest answer that I could come up with. I definitely hope that I’ll be where the gentleman in the below video is, but there’s no way for me or anyone else to predict that. The brain heals the way it heals, and no brain heals exactly like any other brain. Even if two brains have the exact same injury (not possible, by the way), they’ll heal differently.

My hopes are that I’ll be walking more normally – my truncal strength and stability, gait pattern, and affected leg strength – in a year; that I’ll be on my way to running; that my speech will be clearer; that my memory will have improved; my ataxic balance, coordination and speech will be more stable; my affected hand function will be more normalized; that my aphasia won’t irritate the crap out of me anymore, and I hope that I’ll be able to write my name without it taking upwards of two minutes.

Let me explain. I can do all of those things. I I can walk, run, talk, remember, balance, speak and understand what’s being spoken to me (for the most part), write… just not well, or at least, not as well or as easily as I would like. But there’s always room for improvement.

I hope that you, whoever you are, don’t take anything for granted, though I know that you do. It’s an inevitability; it’s likely that I’ll be taking my vision for granted again within a short amount of time.

Taking things for granted happens. It’s a part of being conscious. But that doesn’t remove any of the value of whatever it is being taken for granted.

Common normality is what the majority of people can do with relative ease – those things are what some of us regret having taken for granted. You don’t know that you took something for granted until you realize it’s gone. And, like my vision, I didn’t realize that I’d taken it for granted until I had an inkling of an understanding of what I no longer have.

But it’s perfectly okay to miss out on things. In fact, simply because an ability has been removed does not mean that the person it was removed from will miss it or wish that they could have that ability again. Humans are amazingly adaptable. We’re incredible.